High Volume with Safety & Profit Vs Whitelisting

With all the recent talk around ad fraud and viewability, it’s no surprise that whitelisting has started to enter into many conversations around brand safety. While it seems smart to reduce the risk of misplacement by limiting ad spend to a small number of premium publishers, it’s actually more likely to harm a digital advertiser’s bottom line.

Instead of bringing control over their programmatic ad spend, these extreme whitelisted domains are showing poor ROI for campaigns. Advertisers aren’t bringing in enough new users and they’re hitting the frequency cap on the users they’ve seen before.

Getting It Right

But advertisers can maintain confidence in their ad buy while still maintaining high audience volumes. Their priority must be to work with partners who are transparent about every part of their processes.

Right from the get-go, advertisers need to make sure their partners are using a variety of tools and methods to create a defensive wall against ad fraud. For example, pre-bid filters, rather than post-bid, can be used as the first layer to prevent Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) and exchanges from sending risky impressions to your DSP. And although the service may need to come from a third party, monitoring for non-human/bot traffic builds an additional layer of protection.